


Princess, Knight, Dragon

by Minutia_R



Category: A Redtail's Dream (Webcomic)
Genre: Childhood, Friendship, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 23:39:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9210407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: Really, Jonna should have been the princess, because she was a girl, but she said the princess was stupid and boring and kicked Joona in the ankles until he agreed to take a turn as the princess, too.  Once he gave it a try, it turned out he didn’t mind.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kiraly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiraly/gifts).



I

At first it was Jonna and Joona. Really, Jonna should have been the princess, because she was a girl, but she said the princess was stupid and boring and kicked Joona in the ankles until he agreed to take a turn as the princess, too. Once he gave it a try, it turned out he didn’t mind. He liked the spare tablecloth with the lace that was the princess’ gown. And throwing himself into dramatic fits of weeping, bewailing his fate, was fun.

But the knight got a sword, which was actually just a long stick, and that was good too. Especially when they forgot what they were playing and Joona just started poking Jonna with the stick. He could usually get a few good jabs in before Jonna found a stick of her own and retaliated.

II

When Hannu joined them, it was great, because then they had a dragon. Even if Hannu kind of made a terrible dragon. Half of the time he refused to kidnap the princess and instead sat making a pile of rocks he thought looked interesting and snarled at Jonna and Joona to leave him alone. When he did kidnap the princess and fight the knight, he bit and scratched--the dragon was supposed to lose, that’s how the story went, but Hannu didn’t care about that. It ended with all of them rolling in the dirt until Jonna and Joona managed to sit on Hannu long enough for him to stop kicking. Also, the spare tablecloth got torn, and Jonna and Joona’s dad smacked them all indiscriminately.

And then Hannu’s parents were mad and the grownups had a big fight and Hannu wasn’t allowed to play with them anymore for a while. But he did anyway.

III

Paju, on the other hand, made an excellent dragon. Mostly because she was really scary. Nobody forgot how the story was supposed to go when she was around. She had a plastic tiara to replace the spare tablecloth for the princess, and they all knew it was as much as their lives were worth if they let it get so much as bent. She even made Hannu be the princess sometimes, because fair was fair. (Princess Hannu didn’t so much bewail his fate as complain about it irritably, and he was never very grateful to his rescuer. But fair was fair.)

IV

One day Paju came over dragging Riikka behind her with one hand and Anssi with the other, and announced that they were going to play, too. Jonna and Joona were skeptical, and Hannu openly and loudly appalled--they were _little_ kids, especially Anssi. But Paju said they were going to play, so they played. Riikka was the best princess, except maybe for Joona himself. When dragon Paju stole her away, she wept tears of genuine fright. Once, when knight Jonna rescued her, she actually swooned in her arms.

It ended up, though, with Anssi being the princess most of the time. He didn’t put much feeling in it, but he did what you told him and he never complained--plus, even though he was the littlest, Paju trusted him with the plastic tiara more than she trusted any of the rest of them. So Anssi sat in his tower and waited patiently to be rescued while the others played the more active roles. There was always a knight, and there was always a dragon, but since there were six of them now they could add more characters, so sometimes there was a king, or a witch, a bear, a ninja, a vampire. Once the knight was helped on his quest to rescue the princess by Donald Duck.

(Donald Duck was Riikka’s idea. Because it was Riikka, and because Riikka was so nice, everyone came to the unspoken agreement that they would pretend it had never happened. Paju had to enforce the agreement occasionally by treading on Hannu’s toes or smacking him on the back of the head.)

V

Paju said there was no such thing as being too old for something, but eventually, they all lost interest in the game.

In the end, maybe it was only Joona who kept coming back to it, running a hundred different versions of the same story through his head in the time between waking and sleeping. He couldn’t be sure because he never told anybody. When people laughed at the things he said, he liked it to be because he was making a joke--and he could make this into a joke, but he would know it wasn’t.

He missed it. How easy it was to slip from one skin into another, the way that he and Jonna had worn each other’s clothes and names when they were small. Growing up seemed to mean being the same person all the time. Joona kind of hated it.

In the time between waking and sleeping, though, he was a valiant knight. A fierce and terrible dragon. A princess, beautiful and doomed.


End file.
